Emotions will affect how we live, for better or worse. They impact how we relate to others and can also affect collaboration, adaptation, and communication in our workplace.
Now, let's look at this applied to agile methodologies.
Just as the Heart is fundamental to the physical body, the "Heart of Agile" is essential to Agile principles. This is so because Collaborating, Delivering, Reflecting, and Improving are shared values in our lives and agile frameworks.
Still, we are missing something else. The reason why we do our jobs: this is where Modern Agile makes its contribution.
Modern Agile has four principles. Let's take a closer look at each one of them.
1. Make people successful
Steve Jobs used to ask his colleagues, "What incredible benefits can we deliver to the customer? Where can we take the customer?".
At Modern Agile, we ask how we can make people in our ecosystem successful. This reflection includes those who use, produce, buy, sell or fund our products or services: what can we do to improve their lives?
When we learn about people's context and pain points, what holds them back and what they aspire to achieve, we can also conceive a path to make them successful.
2. Make safety a prerequisite
Safety is a basic human need and a key to high performance. That's why we must make safety a prerequisite by establishing a safe environment.
To create an agile environment, we must protect people's time, information, reputation, money, health, and relationships. On the other hand, we strive to make our collaborations, products, and services resilient and safe.
3. Experiment and learn quickly
You can't make people successful or make safety a prerequisite if you're not constantly learning.
When we get stuck, we probably need to go beyond our routine. People using agile frameworks do that by experimenting and creating a "safe to fail" environment where their team members are not afraid to think out of the box.
4. Deliver value constantly
Anything that is not delivered is not helping anyone become more successful or confident.
In modern agile, we always ask ourselves, "How could valuable work be delivered faster?"
Delivering value forces us to break significant challenges into smaller parts that can be delivered safely now and not later.
We often seek change without considerably altering our way of thinking. When we operate that way, the changes are temporary. For transformations to be permanent, we must change how we think and act according to the principles.
This is why agile methodologies are considered a mindset that can bring fundamental transformation. When teams embrace an agile framework and make it second nature, they join a cycle of collaboration, delivery, reflection, and improvement that leads them to extraordinary results but primarily to remarkable personal growth and satisfaction.
